


Day 8: Lab

by ApophisOfficer



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, Nonbinary Character, Promptober 2019, Wordcount: 500-1.000, ngl I'm not happy with this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 12:00:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20966210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApophisOfficer/pseuds/ApophisOfficer
Summary: Sheriff Sam did not get their job by slacking off.





	Day 8: Lab

Sheriff Sam did not get their job by slacking off. They checked their surveillance reports and filed all tax forms and their own administrative paperwork was flawless. You didn’t get to be Sheriff in a place like Night Vale without a good cleaned up record and the kind of connections that could clean that record up if needed. 

Sam tried not to need those connections too often, wouldn’t do to owe anyone anything with the things they wanted.

The Sheriff's Secret Police’s labs were an investment Sam themself when they took office. A town like Night Vale require the people taking care of it to have up-to-date R&D. If they were going to be arresting five headed dragons for unlawful impersonation, murder, and assaults on the mayor they needed the equipment to back it up. 

Personnel were the department’s biggest investment, but R&D was a very close second. So it was necessary, as a large investment of their department, that Sherriff Sam check the labs often. After all, they couldn't have things going wrong in the very labs they so heavily pushed to fund. 

Their circuitous inspection began in the weapons section. Lately they’d been attempting to determine a combat use for cats, after all their poison spine ridges and venom sacs were just asking for the Secret Police to use them. They’d gotten so far as to milking the cats like snakes, though they did not yet know what to do with the poison and they’d lost several lab techs in the process. 

Maybe they could simply set the cats loose in places? Though that wasn’t a very targeted method and the casualties involved in corralling them up, as not even the police could get away with ignoring the law about not letting cats free to roam the street. They were dangerous creatures! Not well left to wander around Night Vale. 

The next lab was the technology section. One side for security and one for infiltration. They’d need to keep up their firewalls if they were going to combat the growing youth and their hacking fashions, but Sam wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to hire some of those youth for their own gain. That Megan and her computer friend alone posed quite the potential, either threat or ally. Sam themself “didn’t know much about computers.” They were a semi-honest, hardworking Sheriff who had no need to computer knowledge and that illusion was one they intended to keep in case their IT team turned on them. 

You could never be too careful with Night Vale. Not after that one revolution. It was always on the edge of Sam’s conscious and with the new feud with the mayor, they needed to be alert to threats.

Speaking of the mayor, he made his way down to the Information analysis area. Tucked away from the other labs so with a high clearance that one had to find the entrance to before they could even use. The number crunchers here were the departments hardest workers. Collecting, collating, and analyzing data on every citizen in the entire town. Their existence was an open secret but actually finding them was a task nigh impossible, with good reason. Even Sam themself had a file in here, under lock and key, only accessible to the head of the department. 

This room held every bit of information to be gleaned about the citizens of Night Vale, most of it rubbish about ordinary citizens and a good bit of it useless as the subject had died in one of the town’s many catastrophic events. 

It was almost funny, there was no secret about how much information they collected on their citizens and yet… the citizens actually cooperated. Perhaps when you had flying dragons and animal carcass storms and glow clouds that could subjugate people, the police collecting personal data was almost bland by comparison. Why worry when they had much bigger problems at hand. 

Whatever it was, it worked to their advantage and as Sam turned away to the final lab anazlying just what was with that radio station, they decided it was something the to enforce. 

Maybe a bank heist in town would enforce the Police's importance. There was one on the move now and all it would really take was a moment of .. non-interference.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta Read by Grammarly.com  
Thank you Grammarly for your good software haha
> 
> You can find my prompt sheet here: https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/854695


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